As anyone who’s read my blog for any reasonable length of time will know, I absolutely loved Bioshock Infinite (if you’re a new reader, then you may read my original review over here) so it will probably come as no surprise that I got my hands on Burial At Sea, Infinite’s latest DLC expansion, as soon as possible. Overall, I enjoyed it a lot, but there is one big, big ‘but’ hanging over the thing.
Burial At Sea brings us back to the Bioshock series’ original, iconic underwater city of Rapture. It is New Years Eve, 1958, just before civil war that ripped the city apart in the original Bioshock, and Booker DeWitt, P.I. gets a knock on his door from a young woman named Elizabeth, who promises to find his missing daughter, Sally.
The first part of the DLC is not particularly eventful, without a single gunshot fired or deranged Splicer in sight, but I found it quite enjoyable nonetheless; it’s the first time players get to explore Rapture before its collapse, and the opulent underwater city is a great environment. The second part takes place in a sunken (well, even more sunken) department store populated by Splicers, and feels very close to the original Bioshock experience; there are ruined shops to be looted, water drips from burst pipes and leaking walls, electricity dances off severed cables and, of course, crazed Splicers leap from the shadows to bash your head in with a length of lead pipe.
Mechanically, Burial At Sea does little to depart from Infinite’s gameplay; one hand fires weapons, the other uses plasmid powers, Booker has a recharging shield and a non-recharging healthbar, gear can be picked up and swapped in and out to give different perks and upgrades and Elizabeth helps you out by chucking you ammo, health kits and EVE and also by fucking reality’s shit up. The Skyhook and Skyrails from the main game are included with Airhook, but due to Rapture’s much more enclosed nature the lines you get to ride are much shorter and less exhilerating than Columbia’s open air rollercoasters. The most major change, and one that I quite liked, is that the weapon wheel from Bioshock 1 and 2 has made a return, meaning you’re no longer limited to carrying two weapons; the flip side is that each one has only one magazine’s worth of backup ammo, meaning that scavenging is a constant necessity and switching between weapons mid-firefight is essential for survival. You also start the game with the Hand Cannon, which made me very happy.
It should also be noted that Burial at Sea is hard. Like really, really difficult. I played it on Normal difficulty, the same difficulty setting I played the main game on, and found myself dying left right and centre. Not only is ammo much scarcer, but enemies seem to be tougher and more plentiful as well; even with Elizabeth’s aid, I found Burial at Sea to incredibly challenging, though it probably didn’t help that I couldn’t find more than one of the Infusions that boost Booker’s health, shield and EVE levels, even with a great deal of searching.
I goes without saying that the writing is good, and I’d say that the DLC is worth playing just for the very cleverly handled revelation at the end of it. I was rather disappointed by the lack of the Lutece Twins, my two favourite characters, who make only a very brief appearance, but the crazed artist Sander Cohen, one of the bosses in the first Bioshock, has a welcome (if somewhat disturbing) cameo.
It is at this point that we must get to the ‘but’ of Burial at Sea. It’s good, very good, but it’s short. Even when I obsessively searched through every last corner and detour in a search for audio logs, gear and infusions (it struck me that Elizabeth must be incredibly patient with Booker as she waits for him to go everywhere but where they need to go on his endless quest for collectables) I completed it all in just about three hours. If the price of the DLC reflected that, then it wouldn’t be so much of a problem, but as it is with its price of £12/$15/€15 it seems to be overcharging for what you get. Did I enjoy Burial at Sea? Yes. Did I have £12 worth of enjoyment from it? Probably not.
Hefty pricetag aside, Burial at Sea is fun, but it may be a good idea to wait for a sale before you pick it up if you want to get your money’s worth.
Verbal Fisticuffs 